People are always asking for more blogs but lately I’ve just been fresh out of ideas. I feel like I have maxed out the empty nester story: homeowners upsizing, downsizing, rebuilding removing. Been there done that. I needed something new to think and write about.
So it was serendipitous that our long-time customer, 41 year Antonio Ciongoli, asked Keith to help out on a video promoting Mephisto Shoes in late March. Watch the video below to see Keith sporting said shoes which, according to the WSJ, “Mephisto, the ultimate grandpa brand, is suddenly, improbably cool. Once the butt of jokes about aging ungracefully, the 59-year-old French shoemaker has become an It-girl and It-boy favorite, producing footwear as treasured for its comfort as for its stubbornly unfashionable authenticity.”
However the point of my blog is not the shoes but Antonio. We first met Antonio well over a decade ago when he was designing higher-end Italian menswear and looking for out-of-the-box items to furnish a Madison Avenue showroom. He found his way to British Cottage and bought a couple of massive iron and vintage wood bookshelves and repurposed them into way cool industrial-style garment racks.
In 2017 he created 18 East, a clothing brand designed to appeal to the newly minted crop of corporate guys who were craving a more relaxed style related to the skater looks they grew up wearing but not wanting to be identified as hip hop wanna be imposters either. His focus is on natural materials, and while comfort is paramount he is not afraid of a little quiet elegance.
Which is a natural seque into what British Cottage has always been about. Our customers have never welcomed a cookie cutter approach to home decor. Yes they share their homes with kids and dogs and messy spouses but they still want every room to be a great room. They want furniture that has good bones and a lot of style–certainly not the mass-produced s__t from a catalog that everyone else has.
And while the furniture we sell is all about function; we want the kids to sit on our sofas and do their homework at their British Cottage tables, nothing says it can’t be attractive and made to last out of materials that are natural and organic and certainly non-toxic. Whether antique or reproduction we want real wood, and never particle board shelves, thin veneers or cheesy cookie-cutter mass produced components.
Meet another totally cool customer who literally puts his money where his mouth is, Tom D’Ambrisi, owner of The Butcher Block restaurant in Long Branch. Ten years ago when Tom was expecting his first child and renovating his first home his mom dragged him into British Cottage to look for a dining room table. This was way before he even thought about having his specialty butcher shop, let alone a restaurant. In the end he bought a large farmhouse style dining table and over the years he would stop in for this and that.
In 2019 soon after Tom opened up his retail store selling all kinds of meat products people started to ask if he could do meals too. Next thing you know Tom took his British Cottage table from his own dining room and put it in the shop (the one on the left in the above photo) and thus his restaurant was born. Over the years he has become wildly successful, combining his family’s insider knowledge of the meat industry with his own unique and crazy talented design sense to create one of the most acclaimed restaurants in Monmouth County–if not all of New Jersey.
Like Antonio, Tom is cool because he is not cookie-cutter, he is not following a mold he is making one and that, we like to think is the point of businesses like theirs, and ours. You do you.